Auditor

How to spell auditor

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce auditor

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does auditor mean?

1. nounA person officially appointed to examine and verify financial accounts.
2. nounA person who attends a course or lecture without taking it for formal credit.

Auditor in a sentence

• The company hired an external auditor to review its annual accounts.

• As a retired teacher, she joined the seminar as an auditor rather than a graded student.

• The auditor flagged several discrepancies in the expense reports.

• The professor welcomed the occasional auditor at the back of the lecture hall.

Where does auditor come from?

Language of origin: Latin

Auditor comes from the Latin auditor, meaning 'a hearer' or 'a listener', which was built on the verb audire, 'to hear'. The connection to hearing is genuine and revealing: in the medieval world, financial accounts were often verified out loud, read aloud by a clerk and literally heard by the official checking them, so the person doing the checking was the 'hearer' of the accounts. English took the word in the late 1300s through Anglo-French, where it carried both the sense of a listener and the sense of an examiner of accounts. The same audire root gives us a large family of familiar words including audio, audience, audible, and audition, all tied to the idea of hearing. Remembering that audit and auditor share that hearing root helps fix the 'audi' spelling, and the plain agent ending -or marks the person who performs the act.

How the word is built

• audit- (from audire: to hear)
• -or (agent suffix: one who does)